(fleeting)

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When I travelled to NYC last week, I brought Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with me. It had, once, been very important to me but I don’t think I’d pulled off the shelf in thirty years. I wondered how familiar it would seem after so long. I started it on the plane. A few days later, I arrived at this page:

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts with gills laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter: they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.